Expert coaches discuss their use of feedback
“They’re the ones out there on the field in the heat of the battle. For me to come in and tell them everything. . . well, I’m not out there to solve their problems on game day, on the field. I just want to steer them and guide them to come up with the answers.” - Participant 8.
Why is this topic important for coaches?
If you’re reading this post, there’s a good chance that you’re a keen consumer of information about coaching. You’ll be well aware that there are seemingly infinite textbooks, YouTube videos, blogs, podcasts, and articles at your fingertips.
Something I noticed early in my PhD studies was that there wasn’t much academic material in which coaches discussed specifics of their day-to-day coaching. There were plenty of resources written from a theoretical perspective, but they were missing the voice of the experts – the highly experienced coaches with years of success under their belts.
This is something that blogs and podcasts seem to have done a lot better than the academic space in the last few years – getting coaches and practitioners to ‘bring to life’ the theory and evidence, and to illustrate the ways in which these things can inform practice. As a coach, sometimes it can be refreshing to hear how expert coaches describe their work, and to hear the distinct lack of word salad in their explanations (‘biopsychosocial’ or ‘destabilising existing attractor states’, anyone?).
What’s the paper about?
The paper covered in this post aimed to find out how expert coaches think about, and use, verbal feedback in their daily practice. The idea behind the paper was to provide some more nuanced detail to the often highly quantitative studies on coach feedback. This paper gives insight into the thinking behind the numbers, as coaches describe their reasons for providing feedback, methods for delivering it, and philosophies around telling vs asking, among other things.
What did the researchers do?
Eight coaches of team sports, all working at the elite level, were interviewed by the researchers, and asked a series of questions about their use of feedback. Questions included:
For what purposes do you use feedback?
How often do you give your players feedback?
How do you know when an athlete has received your feedback?
Coach responses were then organised into themes, and reported on in the paper with some short quotes to illustrate individual examples.
What did they find?
There’s a lot to unpack in this paper. Instead of trying to do it all justice, here’s a small selection of some interesting findings:
1. It’s all about the athletes.
Coaches spoke of the importance of putting athletes at the centre of the problem-solving process, rather than giving them all the answers through their feedback. Coaches also reported using strategies such as withholding feedback during a training session and allowing athletes to “find their own way”.
2. Feedback isn’t just information about how to get better.
While most coaches agreed that a major purpose of feedback is to help athletes to improve performance, coaches also spoke of the importance of providing positive feedback to build athlete confidence. On game day, giving some well-timed praise can serve to reassure an anxious player.
3. Different strokes for different folks.
Coaches shared their beliefs about tailoring feedback for each athlete. One coach reported running a pre-season survey, in which athletes are asked about how they like to receive feedback. Coaches reported having some athletes who loved spending time in the film room, and some who preferred feedback out on the training track. Getting the right mix of positive to negative feedback was also discussed, and was thought to depend on the athlete.
So what?
You might choose to adopt some of the concepts in this paper into your own coaching philosophy. You might also use these ideas as confirmation or reassurance that what you’re doing seems to also work for others. It might also be an interesting exercise in deciding what might not work for your particular coaching environment. Comparing yourself to coaches at the elite level, particularly if you’re not currently there yourself, can be fraught with danger. It’s important to note that all-important saying about coaching: “it depends”!
If nothing else, hopefully this article helps to add some colour and detail to the sometimes dry and wordy world of coaching research.
Questions for coaches to reflect on:
How/when/why do I use feedback?
How do you know when an athlete has received your feedback?
How do you tailor feedback for your individual athletes?
How do I know whether my athletes already know the information in the feedback I’m about to give?
How is your use of feedback different to the coaches described in this study?
Want to read more?
This post is a summary of the paper ‘Sports coaches’ knowledge and beliefs about the provision, reception, and evaluation of verbal feedback’, which I co-authored along with Prof John Hattie and Prof Damian Farrow. The full article appears in Frontiers in Psychology, and was published in September 2020. The full version is freely available here:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.571552/full